Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Dixon
“You should write a book.”
How absurd was that?
Me, a fucked-up, recovering heroin, alcohol, and pain pill addict. An asshole who’d abandoned his son and his family. Who’d lied and stolen and cheated. Who had spent more nights locked in a jail cell than he wanted to admit.
Write a book?
I was no writer. I was a misfit, a ne’er do well, like my old man used to say.
I’d watched people die. I’d caused three people’s deaths.
Four if you counted that son of a bitch, Noah Lee, who I hoped died as a direct result of the anguish he felt about how he’d treated me.
I wasn’t sure if it had any effect on the prick ’cause I was high as a kite outside his hospital room when he took his last breath.
I couldn’t have told you my name that day for all the shit coursing through my veins.
Only blood flowed through them now as I pulled the hardback chair to my room’s window. I sat and tried to get comfortable, watching and waiting.
Three nights I’d sat at this window. The first time it was because I didn’t know what else to do with myself.
The room I’d rented was so goddamn small, it felt like I was locked up again.
I needed air and space, but I’d already walked miles around Wisper.
I had nowhere else to go, so I opened the window and let the hot, claggy, evening shadows rush in and surround me.
Listening to the utter silence of Wisper at midnight, it reminded me of my cabin in the Cascades. That place had been so silent and dark there at night that if my power went out, which it often did, I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or closed.
I had just decided to shut the window and sweat myself to sleep in bed, when she walked by.
AJ.
Assuming she must’ve been having an uncommon bout of insomnia, I didn’t expect to see her again the second night, but I did, and I watched as she patrolled the street, counting her cracks again and touching every plant and flower she passed on her way.
Tonight, I’d come prepared with a cup of steaming chamomile tea Mrs. Ellison had fixed for me before she’d gone to bed that was lukewarm now but would hopefully still be effective.
Her only other tenant had checked out and left town, a birdwatching guy from over somewhere in Idaho, so there wasn’t even the sound of the videos he played on his phone to distract me from my thoughts.
Mrs. Ellison watched Jimmy Kimmel Live! before bed every night, but the TV was in her room and not available to me.
She told me I could get my own if I wanted to, the noise wouldn’t bother her, but I’d never been much for TV.
I liked the stories in my head better.
I hadn’t been back out to the ranch yet.
I spent the last three days pounding the pavement, looking for a job, and I walked out to Mickey Finkle’s used car lot.
He sold me an old, like really old, El Camino.
But it wasn’t like I planned on back roading anytime soon, so the beater would do for now to get me around town.
It needed a new exhaust, and the upholstery had been ripped to shit, but I’d always been good at fixing stuff like that, and it would give me something to do on days I wasn’t working.
Mrs. Ellison said she’d knock some money off my rent if I fixed the shower in the upstairs bathroom, which didn’t so much spray water as it did leak it, so that was first on my to-do list.
When I showed up for my first AA meeting in Wisper, I also inquired at the community center about available work, and Theo said I was in luck because his handyman had just quit and opened his own Mr. Fix-It business. The handyman position paid well, and Theo even offered health insurance.
While I was there, I took advantage of the center’s clothing donation room, found me a few new shirts and two pairs of jeans that looked worn, but not so bad that anyone might notice or scoff.
I still had a hard time spending money on new things.
I’d tried to convince myself it was because I was trying to give back to the earth, recycle, protest grotesque capitalism and all that bullshit, but that was a thin lie.
I still didn’t think I deserved new things.
Boxers and socks, though, those were my big splurge.
Found a pack of each over at Henly’s my first day back.
Before I left Ace’s House, Theo also offered me the NA meeting leader position he still needed to fill.
Of course, that job was a volunteer thing and didn’t pay bupkis, but I turned him down because I had no clue how to be a leader.
He said I should think about it and decide once I’d gotten settled, but it wasn’t for me.
I was glad for sobriety and grateful for AA and NA.
Those meetings and all the addicts attending them day after day in every city in America had been my saving grace more times than I could count.
Knowing millions of people were out there fighting the same fight as me made me feel a little bit less alone, but it was better for me to distance myself from people’s pain.
If I got too close, I took on their worries and sorrows like they were my own, but I had enough of my own burdens.
The weight of everybody else’s was too heavy to bear anymore.
Instead, I took a second, part-time position at the animal clinic on the weekends, tending the animals boarded there or recovering from treatment.
Now that was a job I knew I’d be good at, especially if I got to be around dogs.
I’d always had an inexplicable connection to them.
They understood me, and I understood them.
All that work would keep idle away. I’d found the busier I was, the less I allowed myself to wallow.
Like now, as I waited for AJ to walk past my window again, my thoughts kept straying to Stuart.
I wanted to know what he looked like when he dreamed.
I wanted to know what his nightly rituals were.
Dinner, maybe a TV show before his bath, a book, and then bed?
Did Bea tuck him in or did Bax? Or did they both?
Did Bea sing to him like Kel had the few weeks she managed to stay sober after she gave birth to Stu?
What was the song she sang…
“Hush, Little Baby.”
Humming the melody, I made up a story for Stu in my head about a little boy who had so many people who loved him, and all that love made him grow bigger and stronger until he was so big he became the king of the land.
The love rained out of him and down to all the people in town, but the rain was so beautiful and warm, so they tucked away their umbrellas, smiling and laughing, and loved him right back so that his love never ran out.
I didn’t see AJ at first, but I heard her as she rounded the corner, cussing up a storm to the night. When she appeared at the end of the Darbys’ fence, she stomped on the cracks in the sidewalk instead of stepping over them.
Something’s wrong.
Grabbing a T-shirt out of my backpack, I pulled it on as I ran down the stairs, hoping I hadn’t woken Mrs. Ellison. When I got out to the porch, the squeaking screen door scared AJ. As I made a mental note to WD-40 the shit out of it, she stopped and whipped her head around to find me.
She squinted, trying to see me under the dark eave. “Dixon? Is that you?”
“Yeah,” I said quietly, moving into the light from a nearby streetlamp. “Just me.”
“What’re you doin’?” she asked nervously. “It’s midnight.”
Laughing, I said, “I could ask you the same thing. This is the third night in a row you’ve gone for a stroll by yourself in the dark.”
She seemed taken aback that I’d noticed.
“I can’t sleep either,” I explained.
“Oh.” She relaxed, her stance loosening a little in relief that I wasn’t some creepy stalker, tracking her every step. “Why not?”
I shrugged. “Dunno. Sleep’s never come easy for me, I guess. Too much goin’ on in my head.”
“Well I love sleep. If I could sleep twenty hours a day, I would.”
“So then, why the midnight walkabouts?”
She sighed, and her shoulders dropped what seemed like twelve inches.
“What’s wrong?” I asked as I stepped off the porch and joined her on the sidewalk. “Somethin’ to do with the flower shop?”
“No. It’s not that. It’s a… a guy.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t expected that answer. I didn’t like that answer.
“It’s not a big deal. He’s just a little persistent, and I’m kinda fed up.”
It had been a million years, but the old urges I’d had when I’d seen her at school or around town when we were teenagers came back.
We didn’t speak more than a word or two in passing back then; our happy childhood had faded with the years.
My anger at my family, my mother, the world, had washed them away, but I still noticed AJ.
She grew taller, curvier, and she’d always been so smart.
Maybe I was creepy because I couldn’t stop noticing now how her hips swelled and dipped in around her waist. Her thick hair fell behind her slim shoulders.
It dusted her shoulder blades and shone under the moon.
And her lips? Full, pink, and perfect. And God, those freckles on her nose— I wanted to kiss each one.
She wasn’t much taller than five-five, and if I held her, she would’ve fit in my embrace like she was made to.
Holding her hand like I had when we were kids, the touch of her skin on mine felt magnetic. I wrapped my fingers around hers, took a tentative step down the sidewalk, and she followed. We walked together slowly, and it felt so much like old times and peaceful, it almost scared me.
“He live around here?” I asked, thinking if he did, I’d be glad to go this jackoff’s house and have a conversation.
“No. He lives east of Jackson, but he keeps callin’ me.”
“Can’t you block his number?”
“I have many times.”
Stopping and turning toward her, I asked, “Don’t you only have to do that once? I admit, I’m no cell phone expert. I don’t own one, but I thought that was a one-and-done kinda thing.”
“You don’t have a phone?”
“Not anymore.”
“How do you talk to your son?”
“I… I don’t.”